Posted on 06/23/2002 9:36:04 PM PDT by 4America
In the four years that Houston lawyer Rick Dovalina has led the venerable League of United Latin American Citizens, the national president has crisscrossed the country hard on the heels of America's fastest-growing minority.
He helped a blossoming community of mainly new immigrants establish a LULAC branch in Memphis, Tenn., and organized a huge membership of Latinos in Fayetteville, Ark.
In Wisconsin, Oregon and Nebraska, from the South to New England, Dovalina has carried the LULAC banner into growing enclaves of working-class Latinos not always welcome or even safe.
Today, as LULAC delegates arrive in Houston for their 73rd national convention, Dovalina knows that some question the relevance of the nation's oldest Hispanic civil rights group in the new millennium.
Latinos can vote, sit on juries, attend public schools, hold political office and be buried in integrated cemeteries, all basic liberties, once legally denied, that LULAC's early members won.
Democrat Tony Sanchez is within striking distance of the Texas Governor's Mansion. Sylvia Garcia is poised to become the first Hispanic and first woman elected to the Harris County Commissioners Court, a once stoutly white, male bastion.
But for Dovalina, one of a new cadre of urbane, well-educated and businesslike LULAC leaders who have wrenched the organization into the new century, the battle for equity still is palpable and the core mission vital.
"You have good areas like Arkansas where they have embraced Latinos," Dovalina says. "But we recently lost a battle against an English-only law in Utah, and bilingual education was banned in Arizona. In Kansas, we just intervened against a fast-food chain that was calling immigration officials to pick up its Latino customers.
"After the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, we also are facing a new resurgence of discrimination against anyone who looks foreign.
"We still have a long way to go."
Hispanics in Houston, a once quintessentially Southern and conservative city, overtook whites in the 2000 Census to become the largest ethnic group. They are now the dominant population in the state's five largest cities; one of every three Texans today is Hispanic, and most inhabit urban centers.
When Dovalina steps down as president during this week's convention at the Westin Galleria, he likely will pass the reins to Hector M. Flores, director of recruitment for the school district in Dallas, a city undergoing demographic shifts as profound as Houston's.
Like Dovalina, Flores is a well-schooled professional who moved up the ranks of LULAC determined to steady and stay the course. The 1990s were a tough go.
Plagued by infighting and major scandals, LULAC foundered as more contemporary groups with sharper political and economic edges emerged -- the massive and sophisticated National Council of La Raza, the research-bent National Association of Elected and Appointed Officials and, ironically, the feisty Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which LULAC itself created.
In 1990, boosted by votes from freshly recruited, all-Filipino chapters, Jose Velez, a Las Vegas casino promoter, was elected national president in a raucous convention that climaxed when his supporters swarmed the stage and commandeered the mike. Velez was later indicted in a massive scheme to smuggle undocumented immigrants.
It was LULAC's nadir.
"Sometimes when the battle is not directed outward toward a common enemy, it turns inward as factions within the group battle for power," says Flores, the only announced candidate to succeed Dovalina. "But at the national level, we're now about consensus-building. We have debate, but there's a very professional decorum, and once we go forward, we try to maintain a united front."
Flores credits the two most recent presidents with bringing a new focus and level of efficiency to LULAC as well as impeccable reputations. But El Paso Customs official Belen Robles, the only woman ever elected national president, and Dovalina, then her legal adviser, discovered Velez had left in his wake not just a house divided but a house broken.
"Belen had to reconstruct everything from scratch," Flores says. "We became very solvent, but we had to restructure the entire financial underpinnings of the organization.
"She gave LULAC the integrity it needed to have to look political and corporate America in the eye as equals. Rick, as her legal counsel, gave it the tough litigator, businesslike perspective."
LULAC and its 700 local councils sprawled across virtually every state survived, and Dovalina today ticks off his accomplishments with characteristic dispatch.
On his watch, the Washington, D.C., national office expanded to a full-time staff that includes a policy director and communications officer. Operations were computerized top-to-bottom, and almost every chapter was brought online.
The first of what Dovalina hopes will be many state offices was opened in Austin with an executive director and full staff focused on Texas issues; he is seeking funding for another in California.
"I worked very hard to get LULAC to run as a business," Dovalina says. "We're now doing very well financially, and we've also been able to develop some very strong relationships with corporate partners."
There was much to save. Dovalina grew up in Corpus Christi, the LULAC cradle where Hispanics, plagued by lynchings, segregation and legal discrimination, in 1929 gathered from the discontented barrios of South Texas and took an audacious step.
Members of the Knights of America, the Order of the Sons of America and a sprinkling of other groups with old-fashioned names but newfangled notions merged into a single group; in numbers, strength.
It worked. LULAC's early years were studded with milestones. It filed and funded the lawsuits that ended 100 years of segregated schools in California and Texas. It spun off the American G.I. Forum for Mexican-American veterans and later MALDEF, to serve as the emerging community's legal arm.
The late John J. Herrera of Houston, a former LULAC national president revered in the local Latino community, in 1954 argued the Hernandez v. State of Texas lawsuit before the Supreme Court that won the state's Mexican-Americans the once legally denied right to serve on juries.
The late Houston restaurateur Felix Tijerina, another LULAC president and son of a farmworker, was the guiding force and financial backer of the "Little School of the 400." Aimed at teaching Spanish-speaking preschool children 400 basic English words, it was the seed that spawned Head Start during President Lyndon Johnson's administration.
The list is long and proud and the fruits of these labors evident. Hispanics emerged from the 2000 Census 35.3 million strong and now rival blacks as the nation's largest minority. Citizenship rates are up, voter participation is on the rise and both major political parties now see the future.
Convention delegates this week will be courted by Gov. Rick Perry and Sanchez, his Democratic opponent. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee will come to coax delegates to bring their national meeting to Little Rock.
It's not a presidential election year, so President Bush took a pass. But White House Counsel Al Gonzales and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez will fly the GOP flag.
LULAC, more than any other Latino organization, bridges the economic and social divides within the community. The new immigrants who fuel the working class, the essential and rising middle class and the growing ranks of college-educated professionals all are represented in the LULAC ranks.
To incoming President Flores, the self-made son of farmworkers, LULAC is ideally positioned to represent the country's growingly diverse Latino population. And the work remains, Flores says.
"I never thought growing up in this state that I would see a black running for the U.S. Senate and an Hispanic for governor," Flores says of Sanchez and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk. "It speaks a lot about the promise of America. There is no dream you can't achieve if you work hard enough.
"But our dropout rate is close to 50 percent and unacceptable. We can only have so many of our kids flipping burgers. As we have continuing waves of immigrants, we need to ensure that they don't become the next underclass.
"We need to see that they assume their rightful place in society."
New immigrants and high Hispanic birth rates have fueled booming population numbers; Hispanics accounted for 60 percent of Texas' growth through the 1990s, and nationally their ranks swelled by 58 percent through the 1990s.
Within three years, Hispanics are expected to be the nation's largest minority.
For Johnny Mata, LULAC director of this 12-county area and its most constant and indefatigable presence, this means new and continuing challenges.
Mata was LULAC director of civil rights when Joe Campos Torres drowned in Buffalo Bayou in 1977 at the hands of Houston police. He was district director when Moody Park in El Segundo Barrio, where the city's Latino population first took root, erupted in riots after the officers involved in Torres' death were slapped on the wrist.
He protested the lack of a Hispanic on former President Clinton's much-touted race and sports panel in Houston; the White House quickly added one. He politely but firmly asked Texans majority owner Bob McNair why the ostensibly diverse team ownership did not include a Hispanic; it does now.
As delegates arrive at the convention today, Mata will be MIA, time-managing his day to include a Baytown rally protesting the reinstatement of police involved in the Jan. 20 death of Luis Torres, who quit breathing after a struggle to handcuff him.
"Our role is to empower our community until we have an even playing field, and we are not there yet," Mata says. "There are superficial and cosmetic public gains, but in the trenches the fight continues and so does LULAC's role.
"Hispanics have the most decorated number of soldiers in U.S. wars than any other group, but since the World Trade Center we're moving toward a police state and minorities will bear the brunt of this. That's why LULAC, the NAACP and other civil rights groups are going to be more important in the 21st century than when we were being lynched and persecuted."
Give those folks at that fast food chain a medal. There needs to be more acts of this sort. Flood the phone lines and email inboxes of the INS with reports of potential illigals until they have to do what they are lawfully suppose to do.
"We need to see that they assume their rightful place in society."
They have no place, rightful or otherwise, in our society if they are illigal, or if they refuse to assimilate. Their place is back home in that cesspool of society they came from. They, and no one else, made it that way. Now let them lie in their own excretment. American citizens owe these people nothing.
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